Personal Benchmark Quotes

“[You’ll] learn how to improve your investment experience, increase returns formerly sacrificed to misbehavior, and worry less about “The economy” as you become increasingly focused on “My economy.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“The behavior gap is why the average investor meaningfully underperforms the average returns for asset classes over time. Yet, many can’t resist the temptation of irrational behavior during nerve-racking volatility and irrational exuberance.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“Behavioral finance sits at the crossroads of finance, economics, psychology, social psychology, decision-making, science and neurology, to name but a few of the disciplines that make up it’s strange brew.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“Given the complexity of life, the enormity of the decisions we are called upon to make, and most peoples’ unfamiliarity with financial principles, it is much less a question of whether people will simplify the information they process and recall and more a question of how they will simplify.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“Despite [the “talking heads” we revere] inability to outperform a dartboard, we continue to look to them and pay them exorbitant salaries. Why? Because they are bold. Surety is baseball, red meat, and the pioneer spirit. Doubt seems wimpy and “Continental.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“There are at least three significant reasons we resist contemplating our personal financial goals: it can be stress-inducing, we dislike numbers, it is socially taboo, and we are slaves to “right now.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“Pop quiz: What is the best predictor of the size of a retirement nest egg? What’s that you say, performance? Wrong! I’m sorry but the correct answer was “deferral rate,” but thanks for playing. The way that goals-based investing increases deferral rates (and thus, wallet share) is by couching investment in terms of personal meaning… Rather than speaking in sterile terms that rob wealth of its holistic meaning, use your goals as the benchmark and see how much easier saving becomes.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“If irrational exuberance can bring about financial calamity, then it stands to reason that rational adherence to a set of rules can save our financial lives. It’s not a complex idea, but it’s one that can have profound implications for the personal and financial wellbeing of our families and even our nations. And it all begins with a focus on-you guessed it-ourselves.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management

“We are neither robotically systematic nor wholly idiotic when making investment decisions. To be sure, we do our best to remain objective and make good decisions, but we are strongly influenced by our cognitive limitations and the cloudy lens through which we see the world. But behavioral approaches, which showcased the limitations of our mental computers, simultaneously gave us the notion that what we consumed mattered greatly.”
― Daniel Crosby, Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management